And I can step out into the light, and all will be behind me.

I was getting married to Tom. He and I walked into the church together to find that they had started the ceremony without us. They rushed us up to the alter and I looked back at my parents. I started crying because everything was all wrong and I was mad they started without us. I tried to explain to them that they needed to start over because my dad hadn’t given me away and the wedding coordinator said, “Too bad. Maybe you should have been here on time.” This infuriated me because we hadn’t known that the wedding was starting, and I told the lady that, adding in a very angry and sarcastic voice that maybe someone should have thought to come down the hall and get us since we had no way of knowing it was starting. The wedding coordinator insisted on it being our fault. She was a bitch and I told her so.
In this type of wedding I was too choose a new name. This name was for the last egg that went through my womb before being married and I would take it as a middle name. Since I wasn’t there, someone picked the name Nicole, which I hated. This made me cry harder. I cursed at the person who picked the name. I think it was Tom’s grandmother. I insisted I get to choose a different name and they wouldn’t let me. I kept arguing and crying but no one did anything. The wedding coordinator’s sister appeared on the side and said she didn’t know why I was making such a fuss about wanting my dad to give me away. She said she had dated him some before my parents got married and it was not that great. I was very insulted by this and started ranting about how my parents loved one another, obviously, or else they wouldn’t still be together.
This whole time I was crying because so many things were going wrong and I was so mad. They continued the ceremony even though I was so upset and crying. I thought, “It is not a good sign if the bride is crying through the entire ceremony.” At this point I felt myself gain a bit of consciousness. My next thought was, “Maybe I’m not crying because all of these things are going wrong but because I don’t want to marry Tom.” The thought scared me and it was too real, so I started to think about how my dress was ugly and would be different. The dress started changing shapes and patterns and things became swirly.
Next, it was night time and I was getting high in a car with two of my friends from school. One of them kept changing between Katie, Ruchi, and Misti. She was crouched down in the foot space of the passenger seat. She was giggling like crazy and said, “Did I ever tell you about this before? I get high and hide.” She laughed more, “High and hide!” We laughed at her and made her climb in the back.
Once she got in the back Brandon was driving the car trying to take me to one of his favorite places to hang out. We got there and it was closed on a Saturday night, which was very strange. There was a flyer saying they had moved the festivities to a new place. He navigated us there and there was a rock bank standing on the tops of buildings playing a show with lights and pyrotechnics - the works. The road was way up high along the tops of buildings, so we were driving right next to the band. They were pretty good! The traffic was terrible so we drove past and the road disappeared into a forest, but he followed it anyway.
We came up to a road closed sign almost right away, so we couldn’t go any further but there was a truck behind us. I was worried they would run into us, so I told Brandon to flash the brake lights. They eventually backed away, and he turned the car around. When he turned it around we were deep in the forest, far away from the paved part of the road. The grass was deep green and very high on either side of the rut that was the road. As we were driving back the truck came back, driving towards us. He swerved into the grass. We swerved into the grass. He swerved back on the rutted road. We kept going in the grass.
I stepped out of the car into the daylight wearing a pink cowboy hat. A house was next to the car with a Chinese boy and his two younger sisters on the porch. I was visiting the family I was going to stay with in China. There was a huge television on the multi-story building next to them showing temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit for where we were and in Omaha. The boy talked to me about China, convincing me I should come. As I got in the car with the whole family I assured him that I would come to China and stay with them. From the trunk area I pulled out strange hats and made every one put one on: a fedora, a little hat with feathers like Lucille Ball would have worn, a pink sparkly cowboy hat, etc.